http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The five years since 9/11, in retrospect, have been like a perpetual workshop in
which Americans argue about the nature of their enemy and how to defeat him.

Along the way, they have made plenty of mistakes, ranging from former secretary of
state Colin Powell's claiming that 9/11 "should not be seen as something done by
Arabs or Islamics," to not allowing an Arab to board an airplane because he wore a
t-shirt bearing Arabic script. What impresses me, however, is how Americans have
constantly, if slowly, improved their understanding of the enemy, as can be seen in
everything from presidential rhetoric to airplane security. Much of this evolution
has been improvised - using existing tools in new ways, preserving old laws but
applying them in new circumstances.

Here's one such example: Hamid Hayat, a 23-year-old cherry packer from Lodi,
California, was convicted in April 2006 of providing material support to terrorists
by attending a paramilitary training camp in Pakistan during 2003-04. In the course
of a police interrogation, when asked who else had gone to the terror camps, Hayat
fingered his 18-year-old American-born cousin, Jaber Ismail, saying he "went, like,
two years ago." Did Jaber attend the same camp as him? "I'm not sure, but I'll say
he went to a camp." Hayat later modified his story, saying that Ismail and another
relative "didn't talk to me about going to camps or anything. But you know I'm sure
they went to the camp ... 'cause they memorize the Holy Koran."

Jaber Ismail had, in fact, lived in Pakistan for four years, along with his father
Muhammad, a 45-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, his mother, and
his two siblings. Predictably, Jaber explains his Pakistan years benignly: "I was
memorizing the Koran because it was important to my mom." Jaber and Muhammad were so
close to Hayat, they listed him as an emergency contact in their passports.

On returning from Pakistan to Lodi on April 21, 2006, the Ismail family changed
planes in Hong Kong. Three family members got permission to go on, but Jaber and his
father were stopped, so they returned to Pakistan. On trying again two weeks later,
they learned that, though not charged with a crime, they were on the U.S.
government's terrorism watch-list, and that they could only enter the United States
after getting "clearance" from the embassy in Pakistan. That meant submitting to an
FBI interrogation and to lie detector tests, which they refused to do.

On Aug. 9, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claiming the Ismails have been denied their
civil rights. The ACLU lawyer, Julia Harumi Mass, states that "They want to come
home and have an absolute right to come home. They can't be compelled to waive their
constitutional rights under threat of banishment." Michael Barr, director of the
aviation safety and security program at the University of Southern California deems
it "very unprecedented" for U.S. citizens to be rendered stateless in this fashion.
Usama Ismail, 20, complains that his brother and father are being treated "like
foreigners or something."

Is the Ismails' exclusion legal?

To get a reading on the feds' legal basis, I turned to William West, former chief of
the National Security Section for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement
in Miami, Florida. "It is a rare decision, but within the legal pale," he explained
to me.

"Section 215 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 USC 1185 allows for the
'travel control' of the entry and departure of citizens. U.S. citizens use their
passports only within the rules, regulations, and proscriptions as issued and
decided by the president. Travel restrictions on U.S. citizens are seldom utilized
(and usually to keep criminal or national-security suspects from fleeing). The law,
however, does also allow for entry control."

West expects that the Ismails "ultimately will be allowed back into the country. But
in the short term, DHS has a legal basis for excluding them."

The DHS not only applied the law to scrutinize possibly dangerous Islamists but its
actions suggest a possible conceptual breakthrough, signaling that the U.S.
government sees the "nationality" of radical Islam to be incompatible with American
citizenship. Thus do Americans improvise and make gradual progress in their war on
terror.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading."
Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.